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Housing
Background * Owning a home is part of the American dream. Find a home you can afford. Like those in past generations, pay on a 30-year mortgage and live in your home for a while. * Find a home you can afford but don't only focus on the price of the home. Can you afford to carry the mortgage, insurance, heating, utilities, taxes, and transportation. Everything counts. * Housing-plank Wikipedia links * Apartment * Commieblock * High-rise * Public Housing * Pittsburgh's housing is old and getting older. Don't increase the taxes if someone makes home improvements. Why penalize constructive behavior? Taxes could be based upon the value of the land underneath the building, not on the building itself. This will encourage people to develop their properties because they won't be taxed for their efforts. Can new housing be built in Pittsburgh? The last new housing development was above the Squirrel Hill tunnel, called Somerset of Frick. The next big site to consider is in Hazelwood. Much of that could be zoned residential. New homes will allow new taxpayers to move to the city. But most of all, the new homes allow current residents to trade up. to the new home while still living in the city. Older, former homes will be up for sale and someone else can trade up. Codes and Zoning Roadblocks In efforts to developed Downtown's Fifth and Forbes, some shop owners wanted to rent apartments on upper levels, second and third floors. However, they were unable to do so because of building codes and zoning laws. Downtown Pittsburgh would become a safer place if thousands of new families actually lived there. Residents would keep an eye on things. Also they would petition constantly for more police protection. Residents would also make Downtown Pittsburgh less of a ghost town after the work hours. Care homes are needed. In poorer sections, why not let people rent out rooms to the homeless or near homeless for low amounts of money? They might not be fancy. They might have to share a community bathroom etc. but people without a lot of money would have safe, affordable basic housing and not have to sleep under a bridge. Ask Les Ludwig to give insights on small care homes. He had big troubles in his efforts to run a group home. so, he went to three residents. Visitability efforts. * Homes that are built with public subsidies should be built to be ADA accessible. Sure, it takes more effort to make the home work for wheelcairs. However, the public money is flowing into the project. * Homes that are built without public money should be built as the owner desires, and up to code. But, the code has to be easy to meet. Links * Matter of Trust editorial about Oak Hill and public housing from December 2006 * Section 8 * Housing-script - pending notes for a housing slide show by Mark Rauterkus * Construction Limits * HUD * Manchester report in PDF * Visitability, a tax credit idea * Comparing Housing Markets * Mine Subsidence * Sexual Harassment in Housing * Housing tax breaks * Homeless Media * Habitat to break ground on project building 9 homes in Westwood - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, January 2008 * Apartments, not condos, for G.C. Murphy site Struggling with economics of project, developer chooses rental units in plans to renovate old Market Square store, November 30, 2006, by Mark Belko, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Apartments are in, condos are out in a Washington County developer's latest plans for the reuse of the old G.C. Murphy store on Fifth Avenue, Downtown. Millcraft Industries now is looking to put upwards of 50 apartments in the old store with rents priced to attract Downtown workers earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year, Lucas Piatt, vice president of real estate, said yesterday. 'They will be some of the less expensive in town,' he said. Details Housing Reports * The housing market has a lot of statistics that swirl around. It gets a little overcomplicated. ** Economic reports on housing is not the "Da Vinci Code". Housing economics are pretty simple. You have a number of people who are in the country at any given time. You have whether those people are employed or not, whether they get a mortgage, whether their income is going up or down and whether their interest rates are low enough to be able to make a mortgage payment. And when you look at those fundamentals, we have a population that is growing. *** The scare story last month was "oh, no, we reached 300 million people, what are we going to do with them?" The story this month is, "oh no, we have too many houses.' Put the people in the houses and I think we've got this one solved. ** It is supply and demand; it's that simple. In 2006 in the U.S., we have an oversupply. We have an oversupply of houses in almost every market, certainly in all of the markets that are expanding. Insurance rates for homeowners are have risen rapidly. Some people can't make that monthly payment. They don't buy on a total value. They buy if they can make a monthly payment. Prices are going to climb until that whole speculative area is gone. * Jerry Bowyer: This country is growing by, on average, 1.5 million people per year and we are building 1 million homes per year at the current rate. So at some point in the near future, we catch up with that reality and we do a lot of home construction.